That First Flight

Published: December 17, 2003

One hundred years ago today, Wilbur and Orville Wright -- bicycle manufacturers from Dayton, Ohio -- flew a self-propelled, heavier-than-air winged aircraft four times into the sea breeze near Kitty Hawk, N.C. The sheer practicality of the way they went about flying is as interesting as the fact that they succeeded. They gathered what literature there was on the subject, wrote to the few experts in the field and then, as Newton might have put it, thought of it without ceasing. They experimented with models, full-size gliders and an innovative wind tunnel before developing a truly practical glider in 1902 and a powered craft, the Wright Flyer, in 1903.

It's true that even without the Wright brothers, someone would have discovered the right combination of balance, propulsion, lift and wing-surface control sooner or later. But it would have been later. Their work was a triumph of rational experimentation.

In that first powered, controlled flight -- all 120 feet of it -- there was indeed something profoundly original, an originality that was confirmed with each successive flight on that day, which ended after Wilbur Wright flew 852 feet in 59 seconds.

The purpose of all those experiments, including the repeated glider trials at Kitty Hawk in the years before 1903, was not just to create a flying machine. It was also to create a flying man. The 1903 Flyer was a twitchy machine. It would have amplified every hitch in the wind, which was blowing almost 30 miles an hour on that day. The engine provided the thrust and the wings the lift, but it was up to the man lying prone across the lower wing surface to respond reflexively to the conditions of flight. It was the human in the machine that limited the first flights, not the machine itself. Those 852 feet were as severe a test of Wilbur Wright as they were of the Wright Flyer.

Flight is ubiquitous now -- more than a convenience, it is a necessity of modern life. The principles of flying are the same as they were when they were applied at Kitty Hawk a century ago, no matter how much the machines have changed. Yet unlike most of life's necessities, flying will probably never be completely commonplace.

When that moment of lift occurs and a jet rises from the runway, there are always passengers who marvel at the fact, no matter how much they have flown. The reason is simple. It is still a marvelous fact.